Thursday, September 04, 2008

Lotusphere 2009...Should I Even Try?

So Lotusphere time is upon us again in a few short months and people are getting all hyped up and excited since registration opened yesterday. This is always a fun time, as the folks in the blogging community start talking about some of the sessions they hope to submit, while others keep their thoughts very close to the vest.

I'm currently wondering what, if anything, I should submit as an idea this year. Are there any topics that you'd specifically like to see at Lotusphere based around the stuff I do here? If you think of something, please feel free to comment or send me an e-mail.

One idea I had (pretty vaguely defined at this point to be honest) is to walk you through the process of doing an application redesign. There are *tons* of applications out there in Notes land that still work great going on 10, 15 years old (or even older!) but the UIs of these applications leave much to be desired. It's important to keep the UI up to date in order to meet the ever increasing demands and expectations from our end users. It might be beneficial to show one of these applications and the methodology you can use to update the UI without a lot of rework of the underlying code. I'm thinking best practices, short cuts, quick wins, etc. It's a balancing act, really, as sometimes many people think these UI things are too "touchy feely" and that we should only be talking about writing code. I don't know...what do you think?

Also...if you've got any really cool ideas and would like to possibly team up on something, let me know that too. As I said yesterday on Twitter, I'll even let you do all the work! ;-D

10 comments:

I'd like to potentially see you do something about Domino reporting or how to use the new Domino tools to do extended reporting, end-user views, etc. I have a TON of customers asking for it, and now that we have some cool stuff coming in 8.5 - might be timely!! (Andrea)

Or how about a session about things that you can do in a Notes interface that you can't do in a Web browser interface (or visa versa) without a huge development effort and how you would go about programatically bridging the gaps.

There is a strong push by many organizations to replace Notes Clients with Web browsers but while Web browsers have their strengths, so does the Rich Client. But few people are standing up and saying "hey this rich client has some strong advantages as well".

The other issue that developers face when developing for both Rich Client and Web browser interfaces (in the same application) is how to maintain as much consistency as possible, because some users actually need to switch between the two interfaces from time-to-time, or for documentation and training reasons you want to maintain a high level of consistency.

Finally with XPages coming out in 8.5 there are going to be a whole bunch of new things you can programatically do in a Web browser (until XPages is available for the Rich Client) that will give Web browsers additional advantages over the Rich Client. Perhaps this needs to be discussed as well.

I can't be the only one, but I have some pretty bad apps that could use a Makeover(ooooh, there's a title for you: Lotus Application Makeover).

In fact, you could solicit entries, have some polling to determine the winner (or loser in this case) and then in your 60 minutes, perform a makeover for the app. You could do the thinking, and have someone else do the coding.

There are two things I've come to look for when reading your blog.First it's about how to think about design. When someone asks for an app to do 'X', you push beyond the obvious and get at the core of what the person/group really needs. This is important when working with long time Notes users because they start to tell you what to design rather than asking for what they need. You have some great ideas for how to facilitate that conversation.

The second thing I look for is the 'how to' for designing. You've helped me break out of a fixed design model that goes back to R4.x. Keep showing us how to implement that idea that meets the user's real needs.

The great thing about your posts is that you provide abundant links to other web sites, technical resources, general information, blogs..all this makes ur site a great tool infact for anyone connected to lotus notes. let me personally thank you for ur wonderful website..I have enriched my knowledge in many more dimensions just going through ur site...Way to go chris..keep the great work up..cheers!!